DATE ARCHIVES
:
January 2017

Firstly, Happy New Year, I hope you all had a great festive season however you celebrate! 2016 was a year of ups and downs (I’m not talking politically) so it is good to finally see a new year in. They say you shouldn’t wish your life away and that is definitely true. I always like to think of a New Year starting as a prime time for a renewal of interest in all things.

On Blog Prefect I have stepped away from publishing purely seasonal articles mostly because they don’t have longevity. If Blog Prefect was a news site I would rely more on seasonality in my marketing mix. This is a little departure to inform you of what is going on with the blog. Undoubtedly this article will date so I will only be leaving it up until the end of March this year.

There are a number of elements to address in this report so without further ado, let’s get into it.

Traffic Reports

The Blog Prefect Traffic reports are my most fun element of writing for BlogPrefect.com. I have developed dashboards, get to interact with all of the analytic goodies and generally talk over the data. I enjoy stats a great deal, doesn’t have to be mine. I have always been a statistic fan.

These are officially on Hiatus for a number of reasons:

Anomalous Data

There was a period during the Trump election where data, especially on Google Analytics, became very unreliable due to an attack by, you guessed it, Russians. The Trump election wasn’t the only sign of dodgy dealings so lay down your Kalashnikov. There were some other unpleasant marketing ploys which have warped the analytical data. It will take me a while to sterilise the infected elements. When producing my dashboards I rely on two sources of data, one of those is compromised at this time.

Low Numbers

My readership of this blog has dropped to a whimper. Part of this is my own fault for not pushing more content and doing more to keep the tribe moving. Otherwise my competition is doing better so I am bound to take a hit.

My Concern

I often feel that my Traffic Reports, whilst informative, take out the wooden bat on myself and beat me. Also, as posts are in short supply at the moment they become the only post some months which doesn’t look great.

Blog Re-tuning

Last year I performed a mass effort to clear deadwood and non-performing posts. I’ve deleted a lot of content. Some of this content occasionally scored hits which provided me some inflow of visitors. They just happened to be the type that didn’t gel with my other content. Until I have more of the right material on the blog, I need to improve what I already have.

Until I feel that the traffic is making a positive bounce Traffic reports will be on hold until further notice. I will still continue to record data and generate monthly dashboards but they will not be on public view.

Image/Logo

I will be refreshing the logo this year to aid with branding efforts. I will be continuing to use the FIMO related picture logo but will create a new scheme for this year with some alternate colours.

Social branding will be uniform.

Watermarks will be applied to personally produced images. (I will be continuing to use Pixabay images.)

Theme

I am quite happy still with the Premium Clicky theme. It does everything I need it to beyond the defaults that were provided with the WordPress install.

Welcome Page

This area needs work as I feel by the data presented that it is a poor converter to viewings. I will be revealing more on this during 2017.

General Feel

I have grown a little distant from BlogPrefect.com over recent time owing to the fact that post-graduation I’ve had a lot to rekindle. I aim to return the sense of fun I initially had with this blog back when I started in June of 2013.

Part of my major plan going forwards is to complete my first science fiction novel. It is currently residing in a 3rd draft status and moving along well.

For BlogPrefect.com over the past year I had really enjoyed some participation between Ahmad Imran and Eli Seekins and want to make this flourish and hopefully carry this interaction on going forwards but with new faces also. I have also enjoyed Twitter immensely whilst Google+ has dwindled.

Current BP project

I’m putting together a toolkit for new bloggers at this time to cover off on a blog post I floated in December. This toolkit will feature in the Resources page and may replace the welcome page.